As more and more customers are demanding mobility, mobile end-devices and wireless services have become ubiquitous. For example, businesses and consumers often opt to obtain a cellular phone service instead of the traditional telephone service in order to increase mobility. Wireless endpoint devices are being used to access services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) from any location via a wireless access network. Hence, more and more phone conversations are occurring in public areas. For example, a cellular (cell) phone may be used while traveling on a train, bus, etc. There is often a need for a cell phone user to speak in low volume for privacy reasons. For example, the cell phone user may need to speak in low volume when sensitive or private matters are being discussed. However, speaking in a low volume degrades the quality of the transmitted speech signal. For example, the Coder/Decoder (CODEC) in the endpoint device (cell phone) may encounter difficulty encoding the low volume speech signal. As a result, the listener on the other end of the call may have difficulty hearing and/or understanding the low volume speech. The traditional method for handling this problem is to have the speaker physically move to another location to gain privacy. However, moving to a private location is not always possible. For example, the cell phone user may be on a bus, train, etc.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus that provides privacy for telephone conversations over communication networks.